The quiet recovery of Ireland’s ancient tongue

ON THE WATERSIDE in Dun Laoghaire, a coastal suburb of Dublin, a small crowd gathers around a patchwork of yoga mats. Naoise Ni Bhroin, a yoga instructor, calls for an anail isteach (inward breath) to the sound of chimes and crashing waves. Her classes are mostly in Irish, long seen by many as a useless language, says Ms Ni Bhroin. But not any more.

A century ago just 18% of the country’s population spoke Irish; UNESCO has declared it endangered. Yet today 1.8m people in Ireland (around 40% of the population) claim some ability to speak the language, up 71% from 1991. Nearly half of students now study Irish at advanced level in secondary school, compared with less than a third in 2005. In Northern Ireland it has overtaken French as the second-most popular A-Level language after Spanish.

Exam reforms explain some of the growth. Final grades in Ireland now place greater emphasis on the oral exam (thought to be less punishing than the written paper). But Irish has also become cool. Cillian Murphy, an Irish actor, chose it for his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 2024. Paul Mescal, another actor, uses Irish casually on the red carpet. Irish-language storytelling and music are earning global recognition, from the film “The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)”, nominated for an Oscar in 2023, to Kneecap, an Irish-language hip-hop group. On social media, Irish-speaking influencers have made the language a fixture of everyday life.

The revival owes as much to state policy as it does to pop culture. Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s president since November 2025, said she would move Irish beyond ceremonial greetings to make it the official working language of the country’s presidential office. The government has set a 20% recruitment quota for Irish speakers in the public sector by 2030. Irish became a fully-fledged official and working language in the European Union in 2022, a milestone that was reinforced this year when Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, sent a post on X in Irish announcing a trade deal with the EU. In Northern Ireland, the repeal of a 300-year-old ban in 2025 means Irish can now be spoken in courtrooms.

All this means growing demand for fluent Irish speakers. Darren O Rodaigh, chief executive of Gaelchultur, a Dublin-based provider of Irish language courses, said enrolment has more than tripled since 2020. Participation has expanded beyond teachers and academics to include young professionals in tech, health care and entertainment. Around 1,900 candidates sat the state-certified Irish-language exam in the 2021-22 academic year. In 2024-25 the number was nearly 40% higher.

Decades of efforts to promote the language are finally bearing fruit, says Tomas O Siochain, who runs a development agency for the Gaeltacht regions, the traditional heartlands of Irish fluency, which are mainly along the western coast. In the 19th century a Gaelic revival movement championed Irish pastimes—Gaelic football, hurling and Irish dancing—over British imports such as cricket and rugby. After Ireland won independence from Britain in 1922 the language became compulsory in schools. The state later established TG4, an Irish-language broadcaster, and poured money into Irish-only primary schools, whose enrolment grew from 16,000 in 1990 to nearly 50,000 in 2023 (about 8% of all pupils).

Few speak Irish daily, and even fewer predominantly. Seaside yoga and other Irish-language gatherings, known as pop-up Gaeltachts, are helping to normalise the language. The early Gaelic-revival activists hoped to drive out the language of the coloniser, but that is no longer a goal. As Mr O Siochain observes, speaking English has helped make Ireland prosperous. Yet for a growing number of locals, speaking Irish helps make it Irish.■